Google Health Beta Live – What does this mean for EHR?

May 19, 2008
John Lynn
2 Min Read

I’ve been following the Google Health announcements for quite a while now and today Google Health finally went live.

It’s been a long time coming and so it will be interesting to finally take a look under the hood. I haven’t personally had enough time to do a full analysis of Google Health myself, but techcrunch posted the announcement live and an initial review.

I think that techcrunch summed up a major part of Google Health and its meaning for EHR software in the following:

Google is planning to open up APIs to Google health to make it easy for other partners to tap into its health platform. And make no mistake about it. That is what this is: a platform. Health apps anyone?

Sure does make for some interesting thinking about how an EMR or EHR could integrate with Google Health. Depending on how my next couple days go, I may see if Google Health has given any sort of specifications for importing a patient record into Google Health from an EMR or EHR software program. In my previous posts it was said to use some form of CCR to integrate Google Health with EMR and EHR software. I hope this is the case. If it is, I think I’ll try to be the first to integrate Google Health with my EMR. I don’t think most of it would be that difficult.

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John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • I went down a similar path with HIPPA — sent The HIPAA Implementation Newsletter to more than 400 subscribers. A blog is certainly simpler.

    I have set up a Google Health Beta Page but have not tested any links yet.

    Have put together a “think” piece on HITECH. Linked from my Twitter account: http://twitter.com/hal9007

    Looking forward to following your posts.

    Hal

  • Hi Hal,
    Blogs are much simpler than Newsletters. Although, I even made this blog into a newsletter. I should have done that much earlier than I did.

    You sound like most people and Google Health. People poke around, but I have yet to find a testimonial from someone who has benefited from Google Health use. It will come in time I imagine or it will fail.

    Interesting presentation. You covered most of the basics. Unfortunately, I think we’re still too early for a real presentation on the HITECH act since so many things are still up in the air.

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